“Nothing to be embarrassed about,” Monroe continued mercilessly. “Look at you, all upset because you shared a few months of life with another.” He let out a second unidentifiable sound, something in the neighborhood of a snort. “What would you say if I told you that I was seventy-one—that’s right, seventy-one—when I found out that your sort,” he pointed a bony finger toward Bean and Pak, “had gone and produced a copy of the whole world and everyone in it. Alter indeed. Well, I outlived him, heh, heh. Died in a fire, he did. Burned his own house down last year.”
“We didn’t make a copy of the universe,” Bean rose to the defense of her sort, “we merely found it.”
“Irresponsible,” Monroe snapped.
“The progress of knowledge,” Pak said, “never stops.”
“Progress? Ask your young friend here if he considers it progress.” He jerked his thumb in my direction. “Ask him if he’d be here today if it wasn’t for meddling in nature’s affairs. Luckily the government put a stop to the whole thing.”
Arni sent Bean, who looked ready to explode, a warning look. “What’s done is done,” he said easily, “but that’s not why we’re here today.”
“Do you have my money, Pierpont?”
Arni got up off the stool, handed Monroe a credit slip from the pocket of his sweater, and sat back down. “We appreciate your giving us the opportunity to examine the item from Felix’s past.”
Monroe grunted in reply, scrutinizing the credit slip.
“Is it all there?” Bean asked with an edge to her voice.
Monroe folded the credit slip and carefully put it away into the pocket of his robe. “What you are looking for is upstairs. It was here when I moved in and I kept it because you never know, I say, and I was right because here you are. The other group, the one that got here first”—Arni swore under his breath—“they were able to start it up. They wanted to take it to their workplace, all of it, but I said no. And I told them they’d better leave it in the same condition they found it, no funny business. Same goes for you folks.” He got up, quite springily for a man who claimed to have been seventy-one 35 years ago. “Top of the stairs and to the right. I’ll be in the kitchen eating my dinner.”
I caught sight of the clock on the wall. It was only 3:37.
Monroe noticed. “The secret to longevity—and I’m the right person to ask, heh, heh—is prunes and an early dinner every day. Don’t touch any of the boxes in the attic, Pierpont, like we discussed. They are all mine. And close the door on your way out.”
I hung back as the others started up the stairs.
“Er—” I stopped Monroe on his way to the kitchen. “My alter, was he here with the other group?”
“Yeah, I reckon. Unless you have a twin.”
A creature slinked by, brushing against my leg with its fur. A tiny cat.
“Did he—” I wasn’t sure how to formulate the question. “Did he seem content with his life?”
Monroe gave me a blank stare. I went upstairs.
Monroe’s attic was a depository for boxes of discarded clothing, outdated appliances, and a variety of furniture, all of it old, covered with a thick layer of dust, and serving as a breeding ground for dust mites and probably larger fauna as well. A lone bulb hanging bare from the low ceiling made a feeble effort at illuminating the space. “What is that smell?” Arni wrinkled his nose as Pak pushed the attic door open all the way; it stuck slightly and left a clean arc on the cobwebby floor. Pak headed straight for the pile of antiquated-looking computer equipment in one corner. “Recently disturbed,” he commented. He knelt down and started connecting cables, muttering softly, “Come on now.”
We dusted off a few sturdy boxes and moved them around to use as seats. Bean settled down next to Pak. As they worked to start up the computer, Arni cornered me next to an upside-down refrigerator. “Just a few more questions, Felix,” he urged, as if I hadn’t spent most of the car ride down and all of lunch answering questions about my childhood. Any minute now, I thought, one of them will suggest hypnotizing me to get at my subconscious and retrieve long-lost details of my early life; and it wouldn’t have surprised me if they did happen to know how to perform hypnosis on willing subjects. The three graduate students digging around Monroe’s attic and my past seemed confident they would find answers and achieve their research goal, no matter what the skills needed or how far they took them from their own field of study, bihistory.
As I pretended to listen to Arni, who was showing me something he called an interconnectivity and propagation of events diagram, it occurred to me that I was stuck somewhere in between, with neither the blind confidence of youth that everything would turn out as imagined nor the experience that builds up as years pass that it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t. Did that mean I was ready to leave Wagner’s Kitchen, comfortable as it was, and try my hand at something else? Perhaps it was time to burn some bridges and just write.
Unfortunately, there was the small matter of having to eat and pay rent. Any potential money made from a mystery novel would trickle in drop by drop as readers discovered it and gave it—one hoped—positive reviews. I felt a stab of envy for authors living in Universe B, where publishers, I’d learned, often paid a bulk sum in advance for a manuscript.
On the other hand, I consoled myself, what if publishers didn’t like your novel and declined to publish it? Whatever its faults, under the omni system, everyone’s work, however brilliant or mediocre or truly bad, received an equal chance. True, one usually had to wade through a bog of flashy, poorly written stuff to find something halfway decent—but it was a race for readers with a level starting line, even if there was a lot of elbowing and shoving going on.
Pak had managed to revive the computer; slowly, with much rumbling followed by a low-pitched shriek, it came to life. Arni abandoned me and went to hover over Pak’s shoulder.
“Someone cleaned this keyboard,” Pak pointed out as the computer monitor flickered on and off, then settled for being on. “We shouldn’t have stopped for lunch.”
“Monroe said to come after three.” Arni shrugged. “What’s done is done. Let’s see if we can find photos 1 through 12 and 14 and up.” Without turning around, he added, “If that’s okay with you, Felix, of course. This computer has been sitting here a long time.”
Monroe’s pet had come up the stairs after us and was padding softly around the attic, its paws leaving tiny footprints in the dust, its whiskers peeking occasionally from behind a box. “Is that a mouse or just an awfully small cat?” I wondered out loud. Arni frowned, said, “Both, I think,” and gave his attention back to the computer.
“What happened to your parents’ things after they died?” Bean asked.
“I came down to collect the paintings—the ones my parents did, not the gallery artwork. Their lawyer took care of the rest and sold the house as is, with the furniture and everything. Just think, had I been more involved in the process, I would have had the pleasure of meeting Monroe earlier.” I looked around the attic. While at the San Diego Four-Year, I had visited my parents once a month and had eaten their food and washed my laundry and paid no attention to the seldom-opened, narrow door that led to the second most unusual room in a California house. (The first being a basement.) Monroe’s claim of ownership aside, some of the furniture did look familiar, though it was impossible to be sure, it was all in such a state of decay. A grungy rectangular thing holding up boxes in one corner might have been a Universe B copy of a white table my parents had used to plan and lay out projects for their gallery. Or it might not.
Pak tapped the keyboard. “Hmmm. This is your parents’ computer, is it not, Felix?”
“No.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s Felix’s parents’ computer.”
“Correct, yes. Did your parents own a similar one?”
“It’s been fifteen years. Plus all computers look alike to me. That one just looks squarer and older.”
“It’s the Bitmaster 2001. Th
ey were popular around the turn of the century,” Arni said as Pak pushed back the box he was sitting on and headed wordlessly out the door, sending Monroe’s catmouse scurrying behind a dresser.
“Did 161 Cypress Lane have the same history in A and B?” I asked as we waited for Pak to return. “My parents lived here, I was born, they rented out the house and moved to San Francisco. Years later, they came back, opened the Art Cave, lived happily for a while, died. Then Monroe A bought the house and burnt it down.” I recalled Monroe’s unpleasant cackle as he pointed out the folly of his alter dying in a house fire. “Did all that happen here in Universe B as well, except for the last part and any cracks from our earthquake?”
“Pretty much,” Arni said. “Some things didn’t happen on the same date and Felix’s parents named their gallery Cave Art, but other than that, yes, pretty much the same.”
“Art Cave is better,” Bean said. “More catchy.”
The exposed light bulb hanging from the ceiling suddenly went out. By the light of the open door and the bluish glow of the computer monitor, Bean felt around for an old umbrella and used its handle to tap the base of the light bulb. The light came back on. “Loose wiring,” she said. I noticed that a cobweb had attached itself to her hair.
“Cobweb, Bean. I still don’t understand why you think this is all necessary. There must have been a lot of people near Professor Singh’s lab on Y-day.”
From where she was putting the umbrella back in its place by the refrigerator, Bean replied, “Four-thousand some.”
“We’ve ruled them all out.” Pak was back from downstairs.
There was no arguing with him.
“What took so long?” Arni said. Pak was carrying the thin black bag he’d kept by his side all afternoon.
“Too much lemonade. Had to use the bathroom. Don’t recommend it. Now let’s see what we can recover—” He pulled a sleek black device out of the bag.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Which?” They all looked at me.
“That,” I pointed to the object in Pak’s hands.
“A laptop,” Arni said. “Er—it’s kind of halfway between an omni and a desktop.”
“Desktop?”
“Computer.”
“And a laptop is a—?”
“A computer as well. They’ve been a bit forgotten nowadays. Lots of people used to cart them around before we had omnis.”
“And an omni is—?”
“A computer too, a little one.”
“Then why give them different names—never mind.”
As various cables got connected and the computers started churning away, I left the students to it and, stepping over the odd box or two, headed for a skinny wooden object by the far wall. Upon examination I decided that it was a combination coatrack and umbrella stand, but it was impossible to venture a guess as to which century, much less to which owner, it belonged. I didn’t recall my parents ever owning a coatrack.
What I did recall was that after we moved to San Francisco, they had worked as salespeople at art stores and occasionally as museum guides to make ends meet. They had managed to give me a happy, if not particularly abundant with things, childhood. I had never tried to put myself in their place before. A bit of a loner as a child, I had spent much of my time with my nose buried in my omni, reading away.
I wondered what Felix’s childhood had been like.
My eyes rested on a solid shape about the size of a microwave oven which sat under a decomposing woven quilt next to the coatrack. I nudged the filthy blanket off with my foot, raising a cloud of dust in the process and making myself cough. The box underneath had a single word written on it in hurried, middle-of-packing kind of handwriting: BOOKS. Intrigued, I was trying to peel the tape off when I heard Bean exclaim, “Here’s something—”
I abandoned the box and went over. Too fast to be read, numbers were streaming across the screen of the laptop, which wasn’t on anyone’s lap but propped up on top of a handy box.
“Fragments.” Pak furrowed his brow. “I don’t like this.”
“I wonder if Gabriella and James found the Bitmaster in this state,” Bean said, “or if they got what they wanted first.”
“Jane, sweetie,” we heard Monroe calling his catmouse from downstairs, “come get supper…”
“Let’s copy what we can and analyze it later,” Arni urged.
“Jane, sweetie, I have Texas cheese…”
“Hurry,” Arni added. “I keep expecting Monroe to come upstairs and throw us out because we’re taking too long.”
“What’s the matter with Felix’s parents’ computer?” I asked the graduate students.
“Wiped,” said Pak.
[13]
4100, 4101, AND 4102
Late next morning, I took three narrow flights of stairs down to the breakfast room of the Be Mine (“the Be is for the universe”) Inn. The bed-and-breakfast where Arni had found us lodging for the night, four closet-sized rooms with a shared bathroom, had been recommended by Franny from the Queen Bee Inn and was run by Franny’s cousin, who looked nothing like her kin and whose name I hadn’t found out yet. Frankly, I was afraid to ask. She seemed a bit put out by my having slept in and gave the impression of being more likely to smack me with a book than make me a present of one. “I’m afraid you’ve missed the quiche. There’s cereal and fruit left. Tea and milk over there.” Franny’s cousin stuck her decidedly non-square chin into the air and walked out to continue her day.
Pak was still missing but Arni had already come down, followed by a hoodie-clad Bean a few minutes later. There was no one else around, the other inn guests presumably having gotten up and consumed quiche at a more acceptable hour. In silence we scrambled to pour cereal and milk before Franny’s cousin returned to clear the remaining breakfast items.
I took a look at the bleary-eyed graduate students. Well into the night, huddled around the antique desk in Pak’s room, we had watched him play the laptop like a maestro, typing commands and running recovery programs. Someone had made a good job of wiping Felix’s parents’ computer, Pak had said, but because that someone had wanted to conceal that fact, paradoxically they could not make an excellent job of it. Whatever the reason, it meant the recovery task on the data gathered from the memory banks of the Bitmaster 2001 in Monroe’s attic was difficult but not impossible. There was a growing pile of documents on the bed by the time I had retired for the night and left them to it.
A few sips of Earl Grey, whose depth and dark hue were growing on me as a non-coffee option, cleared the grogginess in my brain. Light streamed into the breakfast room through a high window, warming the dark paneling on the walls. Outside, a warbler could be heard chirping. Across the table Bean shook her head dejectedly. “We didn’t find as much as we hoped.”
“I wouldn’t say that exactly,” Arni said and yawned.
“I know, I know. I’m not a morning optimist. Talk to me after breakfast.” She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and buried her face in the cereal bowl.
“You found photos, then?” I asked Arni.
“Credit card receipts.” He reached for a knife and a rather strangely shaped apple and started peeling it. “Before we had identicards, people used to carry something called credit cards to pay for things, especially once the runaway inflation took hold and coins and paper bills became impractical. You couldn’t carry cash, you needed such large amounts of it, even for little things—prices were high and rose often, sometimes more than once a day. From the receipts that we found, it looks like 4100, 4101, and 4102 went on a drive—”
“Forty-one-oh-oh?”
“Sorry, I’m used to the number reference system. I meant you and your parents, the citizens Sayers, that is, Mr. and Mrs. Sayers—”
“Patrick and Klara is fine.”
He finished peeling the strange apple, offered Bean and me a slice each, then wiped his hands and took his omni off his neck. “I’ve drafted a timeline. In 1986, January 6 fell
on a Monday. It was right after the holidays, so there were few tourists around in Carmel. Your parents probably closed their gallery for the day.”
I couldn’t remember my parents taking a day off—even if the gallery was closed, there were always pickups or deliveries to be made, paperwork to be done, or even just regular dusting, rearranging, and cleaning of the gallery space. If they went on a vacation, it would always turn out to be a pretext for acquiring new gallery pieces.
“The first receipt dated January 6 is from a Carmel restaurant called the Big Fat Pancake—it’s not there anymore—the bill was paid just before nine. After that, presumably, you all piled into your parents’ car, little Felix snug in his car seat—”
“It was a brown Chevrolet,” I said. “I remember riding in it.” What I didn’t recall was finding the experience of being driven around as a child as nerve-wracking as I found it as an adult.
“—and headed north. We know this because there is a gas station receipt on the way up and then a receipt from a parking lot within walking distance of the Golden Gate Bridge. The parking lot is part of the Presidio campus nowadays,” he said as an aside. “That receipt was issued at 11:15. The yabput, as we all know, occurred at 11:46:01, and for anything beyond that point in time we have to be careful to refer to 4100B, 4101B, and 4102B, to differentiate those three persons from their Universe A counterparts 4100A, 4101A, and 4102A, the last of which is you.”
“Right,” I nodded.
“Photo 13, the one in your Aunt Henrietta’s possession, was taken on foot near the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge—but whether it was taken before the yabput or after, we have no way of telling. All we can say for sure is that at eleven fifteen you parked near the bridge for some photo-taking. Unless you stayed for less than half an hour, at 11:46:01 you would have been within the event radius.” He paused to let that sink in.
“The next and last receipt of the day was signed by Klara Sayers at a Pier 39 restaurant, a driving distance away. The Quake-n-Shake. It’s still there.” He checked his omni screen. “Lunch was fourteen thousand dollars—a ridiculously large amount, but that’s in old dollars, before the devaluation. Paid at 1:05.” He leaned back in the antique chair as far as it would go without toppling and sank his teeth into an apple slice.
Regarding Ducks and Universes Page 13